How I Finally Learned I'm Not Just 'Different' — I'm A Sociopath

M.E. Thomas is the adopted pen name of a law professor
who wrote a new book titled, "Confessions
of a Sociopath; A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight." In it,
Thomas describes her life — she was raised by
catastrophically inept and selfish parents — and how it changed
once she realized that she wasn't simply different from everyone
else.

She was — and still is — a sociopath: someone who lacks the
ability to feel or sympathize with others.

Thomas and her publisher granted Business Insider permission
to excerpt the section of her book in which Thomas describes how
she first discovered she was a sociopath.

It took an early life crisis — her career collapsed and she
started abandoning her friends — to force Thomas to ask what was
wrong with herself.

How did I eventually come to think I was a sociopath? With all of
the benefits of hindsight I can see that there were plenty of
signs. But it took a professional and personal collapse in my
late twenties to make me care enough to investigate.

My family likes to joke about my inability to stick to one thing
for longer than a few years. High school was a little bit of a
farce but I tested well enough to become a National Merit
Scholar. In college I majored in music on a whim. I chose
percussion because the core requirements were split to cover four
instruments, and I didn’t have the attention span to focus on
just one. I chose to go to law school because it was one of the
few graduate programs without prerequisites and I needed
something to do. I tested well on the LSAT and got into a top law
school, despite having the GPA of someone who, though clearly
intelligent, is easily bored.

After law school I was hired as an attorney at a self-described
“elite” law firm. All of my colleagues were recruited from the
top of their classes at their top ten schools. I barely made the
firm’s grade cutoffs, and I had graduated with honors. We were
supposed to be the best of the best, and the firm charged a
premium. Just two years out of law school, my base salary was
$170,000 with a double bonus totaling $90,000 and I was in a
lockstep pattern of significant raises every year I stayed. But I
was a terrible employee.

I have never been able to work well unless it directly benefited
my mind or my résumé, no matter how lucrative the work was. I
spent most of my effort in dodging projects and scheduling my day
around lunch appointments and coffee breaks. Still, when I got my
first bad review I was surprised. I was even more surprised when
I eventually got called into my supervising partner’s office and
told to shape up or ship out.

I didn’t shape up. I interviewed with other firms and got an
offer from a similarly prestigious firm that paid more, but I
wasn’t interested in continuing to be a well-paid paper pusher. I
was meant for greater things than being a junior legal associate;
I was sure of it. A couple months later I was out on the street
with a banker’s box of personal belongings, waiting for a friend
to pick me up.

Around this same time, a close friend’s father was diagnosed with
cancer. Whereas she had once been a pleasure to be
around—intelligent, wise, independent, and insightful—she was
suddenly emotionally fragile and beset by family obligations. I
was exhausted by trying to accommodate her, and I felt that I was
suddenly putting more effort into the relationship than I was
getting out of it. I decided to cut off all contact with her. At
first all I felt was relief. Eventually I missed her, but I had
expected that, and I tried not to let it bother me too
much.

I spent the next couple of years receiving unemployment insurance
checks. My family was worried for me. They wondered what I was
planning on doing with my life. But I never had those sorts of
existential crises. I always live in two-year increments. I
figure anything beyond that is just so uncertain that it can
basically be disregarded as a possibility.

This compounding of losses was unusual for me, though—even my
two-year plan seemed bleak. I found myself at loose ends,
directionless and, I had to admit, fairly mindless. I had
squandered a prestigious and lucrative job in my chosen field. I
considered going to business school, but for what? To repeat a
cycle of success and devastation for the duration of my life? I
had heartlessly put aside a friend in her time of need. How many
more relationships did I have to destroy? I knew these were not
the actions of a normal person, and I began to admit
that my life was not sustainable. If I wasn’t normal, what was
I?

With a ruthlessness I usually reserved for other people, I
stripped away my own artifices to discover who I really was. I
realized that all my life I had been trying to be like the
chameleons I had learned about as a child in my big book of small
reptiles. The social part of me had evaporated, making it
apparent that all of my efforts to entertain were designed to sit
on the very outer surfaces of me, separate and apart from what
existed inside. And those insides—they were impenetrable. I had
never liked people to look at me; I wanted to be the only one
doing the looking. But now I realized that I never bothered to
look closely at myself.

I had grown accustomed to believing my own lies. I would fixate
on moments that made me feel normal. A monster would not cry at a
sad movie. Her heart would not break from a lover’s departure. So
my tears were proof that I was normal, as was the pain in my
chest, about which so many songs have been written. How could my
heart be broken if there was no heart to break? It had been easy
to convince myself that I was not the one with the problem.

It is one thing to lie to others, but I had been lying to myself
for years. I had become reliant on self-deception and forgotten
who I was. And now I didn’t really understand myself at all. I
wanted to stop being a stranger to myself; for the first time in
my life, that bothered me enough to want to do something about
it.